Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech. Benjamin Franklin, writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, July 9, 1722

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

FCC Head:Chairman Julius Genachowski

In his government biography, appear the following highlights: Genachowski’s public service spanned broadly across government. His confirmation as FCC Chairman returns him to the agency where, from 1994 until 1997, he served as Chief Counsel to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, and, before that, as Special Counsel to then-FCC General Counsel (later Chairman) William Kennard. Previously, he was a law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice David Souter and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. (ret.), and at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for Chief Judge Abner Mikva. Genachowski also worked in Congress for then-U.S. Representative (now Senator) Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and on the staff of the House select committee investigating the Iran-Contra Affair. Genachowski has been active at the intersection of social responsibility and the marketplace. His acceptance speech follows: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-291834A1.doc

…Put simply, our communications infrastructure is the foundation upon which our economy and our society rest. And it has never been more important that we unleash its potential. Our nation is at a crossroads. We face a number of tremendous challenges: our economy, education, health care, and energy, to name a few. If we do our jobs right and harness the power of communications to confront these challenges, we will have chosen the right course, and we will make a real positive difference in the lives of our children and future generations….

As the country’s expert agency on communications, it is our job to pursue this vision of a more connected America, focusing on the following goals:

Helping deliver public safety communications networks with the best technology to serve our firefighters, police officers, and other first responders.

Advancing a vibrant media landscape, in these challenging times, that serves the public interest in the 21st century.

Seizing the opportunity for the United States to lead the world in mobile communications.

These are just some of the goals we will pursue in the days ahead. How we will work will be central to what we can achieve. We will be fair.

We will be open and transparent. Our policy decisions will be fact-based and data-driven. We will strive to be smart about technology; smart about economics and businesses; smart about law and history; and smart every day about how our actions affect the lives of consumers. We will use technology and new media to enhance the everyday worklives of FCC staff, green the agency, and improve overall operations of the FCC – running efficiently, communicating effectively, and opening the agency to participation from everyone affected by the FCC’s actions. And, stay tuned, we will have a new FCC website.

Why do we serve in government and why do we serve at the FCC? We serve because we believe our nation can always do better and that it must do better. We serve because, in our America, we are defined not by what we earn, but by what we give…. That’s never been more true than today. Communications must play a role in solving many of our nation’s most pressing challenges. It’s the FCC’s job – our job – to turn this aspiration into reality. We will be judged by whether we find concrete, practical ways to improve the lives of all of our nation’s people.

From the Center for American Progress, the Soros Progressive Movement now in charge of our government, here is the report the new FCC head and FCC “Diversity” Czar are using to co-opt free speech in America. This is a 40 page pdf document co-authored by Mark Lloyd, the Diversity Czar, himself. Here is a peek:

“As this report will document in detail, conservative talk radio undeniably dominates the format:

Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.

Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk—10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.

A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.

This dynamic is repeated over and over again no matter how the data is analyzed, whether one looks at the number of stations, number of hours, power of stations, or the number of programs. While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, conservative talk continues to be pushed out over the airwaves in greater multiples of hours than progressive talk is broadcast.

These empirical findings may not be surprising given general impressions about the format, but they are stark and raise serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.

There are many potential explanations for why this gap exists. The two most frequently cited reasons are the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and simple consumer demand. As this report will detail, neither of these reasons adequately explains why conservative talk radio dominates the airwaves.

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management.”

Understanding the public sphere–and developing good public policy to support it–requires access to data about media and the public sphere: data on industry structure, audiences, programming, internet traffic, and other basic measures of our increasingly convergent media environment. In the U.S., much of this data is privately collected, and priced for large corporations. Independent researchers, public interest groups, and policymakers operate at a major disadvantage in this environment. For many reasons, unequal access to data is a recipe for poor public policy. Notably, it makes the examination of policy proposals and evaluation of policy outcomes difficult at best. As this situation becomes the norm, media policymaking moves away from basic principles of public accountability. The consortium is a vehicle for expressing the data-related concerns and collective bargaining power of scholarly and public-interest communities in this area.

Six Steps Toward a Stronger, More Transparent, More Accountable FCC in the Obama Era (yeah, right)

American Thinker on Obama Threat to Free Speech in America (pre-election warning)http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/obama_to_critics_just_shut_up.html …What makes Obama’s affinity for suppressing dissent even worse is that mainstream newspapers and television networks, the very institutions expected to act as watchdogs and to be a forum for the expression of free speech of all persuasions, have failed the American people during this election not only through biased reporting but also by their shocking failure (refusal?) to dig beyond the surface into Obama’s questionable background. As a result, in this election, the American people have been stripped of the protections normally provided by a vibrant and critical press, one of the most important weapons a free nation has against its leaders (or leaders-to-be) and against the tyranny of power.
Should Obama be elected to the presidency, Americans should expect such ugly aggressive tactics to continue, and Americans who disagree with President Obama should expect to be silenced. Whether it is through Obama’s use of the mainstream press as a government mouthpiece, the imposition of the Fairness Doctrine to suppress (and in many cases eliminate) radio and television programs or print media outlets critical of an Obama administration, or, the sicking of the press and surrogates on citizens who dare question those in power, Americans are about to experience on a national scale what dissenting students and faculty on American campuses have experienced for years….

The New Social Change Agenda is Not The Only Threat to Free Speech

Book: Censorship, Inc.: The Corporate Threat to Free Speech in the United Statesby Lawrence Soley -Amazon.com notes:
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is a landmark in the defense of free speech against government interference and suppression. In this book we come to see how it also acts as a smokescreen behind which a more dangerous and insidious threat to free speech can operate. Soley shows how as corporate power has grown and come to influence the issues on which ordinary Americans should be able to speak out, so new strategies have developed to restrict free speech on issues in which corporations and property-owners have an interest. Censorship, Inc. is a comprehensive examination of the vast array of corporate practices which restrict free speech in the United States today in fields as diverse as advertsing and the media, the workplace, community life, and the environment. Soley also shows how these threats to free speech have been resisted by activism, legal argument, and through legislation. Grounded in extensive research into actual cases, this book is at the same time a challenge to conventional thinking about the nature of censorship and free speech.

When Internet journalist Joe Kaufman wrote an article exposing terrorist connections in two American Muslim groups, he was sued by a swarm of Islamic organizations, none of which he had mentioned in his online article. The technique is called by some “legal jihad” or “Islamist lawfare,” and the Thomas More Law Center, which is representing Kaufman in the lawsuit, claims Muslim advocates are using the strategy to bully online journalists into silence. “The lawsuit against Kaufman was funded by the Muslim Legal Fund for America. The head of that organization, Khalil Meek, admitted on a Muslim radio show that lawsuits were being filed against Kaufman and others to set an example,” claims a Thomas More statement on the case. “Indeed, for the last several years, Muslim groups in the U.S. have engaged in the tactic of filing meritless lawsuits to silence any public discussion of Islamic terrorist threats.”

http://townhall.com/columnists/JillianBandes/2009/05/20/free_speech_under_threat After feeling pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Sen. Arlen Specter cancelled his appearance at a conference Tuesday on free speech protections, bringing attention to some of the of the very issues the conference was designed to highlight. “Libel Lawfare: Silencing Criticism of Radical Islam” focused on the prosecution of American citizens under foreign libel laws, which are typically much looser than First Amendment speech protections in the U.S. Foreign laws are commonly targeted at Americans who publish or speak about controversial issues such as Islamic terrorism; if an American criticizes a foreign national and the foreign national doesn’t like it, lawsuits can loom.

DO NOT TAKE FOR GRANTED THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES WILL GUARANTEE YOUR RIGHT TO SPEAK

Freedom of speech

Sedition

The Supreme Court never ruled on the constitutionality of any federal law regarding the Free Speech Clause until the 20th century. The Supreme Court never ruled on the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, whose speech provisions expired in 1801. The leading critics of the law, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, argued for the Acts’ unconstitutionality on the basis of the First Amendment, among other Constitutional provisions (e.g. Tenth Amendment). In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), the Supreme Court said, “[a]lthough the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history.”

After World War I, several cases involving laws limiting speech came before the Supreme Court. The Espionage Act of 1917 imposed a maximum sentence of twenty years for anyone who caused or attempted to cause “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States.” Under the Act, there were over two thousand prosecutions. For instance, one filmmaker was sentenced to ten years imprisonment because his portrayal of British soldiers in a movie about the American Revolution impugned the good faith of an American ally, the United Kingdom. The Sedition Act of 1918 went even further, criminalizing “disloyal,” “scurrilous” or “abusive” language against the government.

In Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), the Supreme Court was first requested to strike down a law violating the Free Speech Clause. The case involved Charles Schenck, who had, during the war, published leaflets challenging the conscription system then in effect. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld Schenck’s conviction for violating the Espionage Act. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the Court, suggested that “the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

The “clear and present danger” test of Schenck was extended in Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919), again by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The case involved a speech made by Eugene V. Debs, a political activist. Debs had not spoken any words that posed a “clear and present danger” to the conscription system, but a speech in which he denounced militarism was nonetheless found to be sufficient grounds for his conviction. Justice Holmes suggested that the speech had a “natural tendency” to occlude the draft.

Thus, the Supreme Court effectively shaped the First Amendment in such a manner as to permit a multitude of restrictions on speech. Further restrictions on speech were accepted by the Supreme Court when it decided Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925). Writing for the majority, Justice Edward Sanford suggested that states could punish words that “by their very nature, involve danger to the public peace and to the security of the state.” Lawmakers were given the freedom to decide which speech would constitute a danger.

Freedom of speech was influenced by anti-communism during the Cold War. In 1940, the Congress enacted the Smith Act. The Smith Act made punishable the advocacy of “the propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force and violence.” The law was mainly used as a weapon against Communist leaders. The constitutionality of the Act was questioned in Dennis v. United States 341 U.S. 494 (1951). The Court upheld the law in 1951 by a 6-2 vote (Justice Tom C. Clark did not participate because he had previously ordered the prosecutions when he was Attorney General). Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson relied on Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “clear and present danger” test when he wrote for the majority. Vinson suggested that the doctrine did not require the government to “wait until the putsch is about to be executed, the plans have been laid and the signal is awaited”, thereby broadly defining the words “clear and present danger.” Thus, even though there was no immediate danger posed by the Communist Party’s ideas, the Court allowed the Congress to restrict the Communist Party’s speech.

Dennis has never been explicitly overruled by the Court, but subsequent decisions have greatly narrowed its place within First Amendment jurisprudence. In 1957, the Court changed its interpretation of the Smith Act in deciding Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957). The Supreme Court ruled that the Act was aimed at “the advocacy of action, not ideas”. Thus, the advocacy of abstract doctrine remains protected under the First Amendment. Only speech explicitly inciting the forcible overthrow of the government remains punishable under the Smith Act.

FCC HEAD GENACHOWSKI Shares Beliefs With Czar Lloyd

According to a 01/14 article in the New York Times at the time of his nomination, he and Obama both attended Columbia, then became friendly while both were attending Harvard. Chair Genachowski also served in the presidential campaign as one of Obama’s telecommunications and technology advisor. He advocated an open internet in the debate over so-called net neutrality and media ownership rules that promoted a diversity of voices on the airwaves. His biography on the FCC site states his background in public service inclusive of Chief Counsel to FCC Chair Hundt as well as Special Counsel to FCC General Counsel Kennard. Prior he was a law clerk at the Supreme Court for Justics Souuter and Brennan and at the Court of Appeals for DC Circuit Chief Judge Mikva. Genachowski also worked in Congress for US Rep (now Senator) Chuck Schumer (D-NY). He has also been active at “the intersection of social responisbility and the marketplace” (uggghhh) as part of the founding group of New Resource Bank- which specializes in serving the needs of green entrepreneurs and sustainable businesses. Also, he served on the Advisory Board of Environmental Entrepreneurs.

This is a follow up to the story on SoldierForLiberty on 08/15/2009 excerpted below:

(CNSNews.com) – Mark Lloyd, newly appointed Chief Diversity Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for making private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do. LINK

“Local public broadcasters and regional and national communications operations should be required to encourage and broadcast diverse views and programs,” wrote Lloyd. “These programs should include coverage of all local, state and federal government meetings, as well as daily news and public issues programming. (see link above for complete story). See Also Link Below:

Glenn Beck exposes Color of Change co-founder Van Jones

Not only an admitted communist, but STORM founder and “Community Activist working within the framework”. YOU MUST SEE THIS. Glenn will be having special programs all week to shed light upon the truth of how our government is being run and who is running it. PLEASE WATCH AND LEARN- THEN SHARE!

Before we implement any sweeping changes of the American political system, how about cleaning up corruption first? In November of 2007, while campaigning for president, John Edwards, the former North Carolina Senator, said: “Washington is awash with corrupt money, with lobbyists who pass it out and with politicians who ask for it,” adding, “This election is the great moral test of our generation.” About a year later he was being investigated for use of PAC money for personal use, his once-prominent political career was buried and the turmoil of his marriage was playing out in public… Hardly a week goes by that we don’t read about politicians getting their grubby hands into another pile of pilfered pelf…. The list goes on and on, including many who were caught with their hands in the till, but will probably never do time. New York Congressman Charlie Rangel has spent close to a million dollars on attorneys as he tries to fend off charges that he failed to pay taxes on 4 rent stabilized luxury apartments in Harlem and a villa in the Dominican Republic. The Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee is a fierce proponent of raising taxes on working people, but, as is often the case with these mountebanks, is less ardent about paying his own taxes. With all these greedy, self-absorbed reprobates making decisions about our future, is it any wonder that people are terrified of handing health care reform to them?

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AUTO CZAR PROMOTED TO MANUFACTURING CZAR from Heritage Foundationhttp://blog.heritage….
If you like what’s happened to the auto industry, you’ll love this. Bloomberg is reporting today that Ron Bloom — the head of the Obama Administration’s automobile task force — will soon get an expanded portfolio, with responsiblity for crafting Administration policies for all manufacturing industries. Yet another Obama Administration czar? Don’t expect the White House to use the dreaded “C” word, but that seems to be the plan.

A Cliff Notes View of Cloward and Piven from Wikipedia (The Backstory- a small history lesson)

The Cloward-Piven strategy refers to a political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, then both sociologists and political activists at the Columbia University School of Social Work, in a 1966 article in The Nation. The two argued that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would create a political crisis that would force U.S. politicians, particularly the Democratic Party, to enact legislation “establishing a guaranteed national income.”

The Strategy
Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for wellfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.” They wrote “the ultimate objective of this strategy (is) to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income… (via)the outright redistribution of income.”

Focus on Democrats
The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption within the Democratic Party. “Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition,” they wrote. “Whites – both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class – would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few… would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.” Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven “proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system — by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice — that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.”

Cloward Piven in the Age Of Obama

American Thinker and American Daughter Carefully Detail How Cloward Piven Strategy Is In Play Today

President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress — while pushing their own health care overhauls — have criticized Republicans as offering only opposition and no ideas for reform, but the GOP, despite the lack of media attention, has introduced three health care bills. The three Republican bills total almost 400 pages and have been on the table since May and June.

In May, Republicans in the House and the Senate formed a bicameral coalition to produce the130-page “Patients Choice Act of 2009.”

And in July, the Republican Study Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), unveiled the “Empowering Patients First Act,” a 130-page plan.

Some of the provisions included in one or more of the bills include: investing in preventive medicine, an overhaul of Medicaid, reduction of abuse and fraud in the Medicare program, supplemental health insurance for low-income families, tax credits for health insurance, and a ban on federal funds being used for abortions. However, supporters of the Democratic plans have accused Republicans of trying to derail attempts at reforming health care without having a plan of their own.
“There is no Republican health care plan out there,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told Talk Radio News Service on July 31 about what he called the Republican-backed “misinformation campaign” that is slowing health care reform. “As a practicing physician, I have seen first-hand how giving government more control over health care has failed to make health care more affordable or accessible,” Coburn said. “The ‘Patients Choice Act’ will provide every American with access to affordable health care without a tax increase, more debt or waiting lines.” In June, DeMint, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, introduced the “Health Care Freedom Plan,” which was analyzed by the Heritage Foundation. The conservative policy think tank said DeMint’s bill could reduce the number of uninsured by 22.4 million people in five years. It also provides grants to help people with pre-existing conditions gain access to affordable insurance, and allows Americans to purchase health savings accounts to pay for insurance. “The time has come for Americans to regain control of their health care choices, and the ‘Health Care Freedom Act’ empowers every American with the freedom to choose and own a plan that is best for them,” DeMint said. DeMint’s bill also has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee. In July, Price, who is also a practicing physician, introduced the “Empowering Patients First Act.” “Today, we present a solution for health care reform that offers more patient-centered choices and care of the highest quality,” Price said. “The ‘Empowering Patients First Act’ is a budget neutral proposal based on the fundamental principle that personal medical decisions should be made by patients in consultation with the doctors rather than unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington.” Price’s bill also emphasizes preventive health care, tax credits, reduction of fraud and abuse in existing federal health care programs, and health care programs tailored to meet the needs of Native Americans and U.S. military veterans.

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"Their final objective toward which all their deciet is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection" - Henry A. Wallace, US VP 1941-45

Up until a few years ago, I was happy filling my life with personal issues of family, work, home. Then, I began to notice our once great country is run by a government which has no respect for the Constitution and no respect for us, it's citizens. I realize now it is up to folks like me to change this. I am only one person, but through this blog it is my hope to point out to ordinary Americans how our rights, our liberty, is being threatened. My belief is by shining a bright light, we as a people can begin to peacefully remove the power hungry, self serving autocrats running our government. This is not about one party or another. This is about the very foundation our country was built on. Our foundation is crumbling. Please help me shore it up! Do not be afraid to Speak Out Loudly! Of the people, by the people, for the people. That is how we will get our country back! Please visit our sister site www.WatchdogCentral.org to check up on your government officials - national, state and local.